Proper care for immigrants as well as Canadians

Many people wonder as to how Canada can fail to welcome 250,000 or more newcomers, as argued by many. Some believe that the country can easily do that given the fast aging workforce and drooping birth rate. Many believe that commitment of the country towards sustained high immigration is a source of national pride and shouldn’t be sacrificed.

Without any question, these arguments are valid, but they skirt the thornier issues that are linked with the impact of high immigration levels, both on the country as well as the immigrants.

In my view, the main problem with the immigration system of Canada is not the number of immigrants which are accepted, but it is the increasing carefree attitude of Canadians towards the ideals of our shared citizenship and the mythologizing of immigration and settlement systems of Canada.

A clear fact is that even immigrants are citizens and our Canadian society has a basic responsibility of ensuring that every newcomer has similar chance at succeeding in life, similar to born-citizens. This means bringing newcomers up to the Canadian standards in minimum time, which is very expensive.

Still, British Columbia and Ontario, which welcomes two-thirds or more immigrants to Canada consistently, received only $900 per person annually from the federal government in order to assist newcomers and this is very less.

So, by increasing the overall immigration numbers, the Canadian society has incurred huge human as well as economic costs. Now let’s consider this- over the last quarter century, low income rates among recent immigrants rose from high 24 percent in 1980 to extremely depressing 34 percent today and during the same period, in case of Canadian-born people, low income rates fell from 17 percent to 11 percent.

The bottom line is that Canada has a simple choice when it comes to setting the immigration levels of the country- if we continue to intake 250,000 or more newcomers every year citing economic reasons, or any other reason, then the government along with taxpayers, will have to spend far more than what is being done on the settlement services of the country. In case, many are not willing to go this way, the only fair course of action is to bring down the levels of immigration in line with the funding that Canadians are willing to spend to assist immigrants in integrating successfully.

We just can’t blindly wait for things to turn really awkward and should review our policies.